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The path from the creation of malicious program to its delivery onto victims’ computers is long nowadays and involves many different players with the same goal – to make a financial gain. Malware authors usually offer their software to cyber criminals who in turn distribute it via underground forums. This is the how they keep their anonymous status. We have previously seen many famous malicious programs start this way.

In the past, the Russian banking Trojan Carberp was heavily advertised on shady forums. In the beginning of the year, an attempt to sell a new ransomware called Prison Locker was reported. Last year, we blogged about Trojan Solarbot which choose to promote itself through a well- designed website, appearing very official.

However, we don’t always know all the details about every piece of malware, from the code to how it is being distributed. The Trojan dubbed i2Ninja, for example, made headlines last year, but we never received a real sample containing all the functionalities the media reported on. Or do you remember the Hand of Thief Trojan for Linux desktops? Its variant for the Android platform was also advertised, but again, we never encountered it in our Virus Lab. These advertisements could have lacked the real code behind them or may have gone under in the pile of cyberthreats.

In March 2013 a new banking Trojan dubbed Minerva was introduced on a Russian forum. We will see that it is awfully successful in what it promised to do. Read more…

Last week we promised to explain in detail how the “Blackbeard” Trojan infiltrates and hide itself in a victim’s system, especially on its 64-bit variant. Everything described in this blogpost happens just before Pigeon (clickbot payload) gets downloaded and executed. The most interesting aspects are the way it bypasses the Windows’ User Access Control (UAC) security feature and switches the run of 32-bit code of the Downloader to 64-bit code of the Payload. And finally, how the persistence is achieved.

From 32-bit Loader to 64-bit Payload

As almost all other malware, this downloader is encapsulated with a cryptor. After removing the first layer cryptor, we can see that the downloader is written in a robust way. The same code can be run under either a 32-bit or 64-bit environment, which the code itself decides on the fly based on the entrypoint of the unpacked layer. Authors can therefore encapsulate their downloader in either a 32-bit or 64-bit cryptor and it will get executed well in both environments.

At the turn of the year we started to observe a Trojan, not much discussed previously (with a brand new final payload). It has many interesting aspects: It possesses a complex structure containing both 32-bit and 64-bit code; it achieves its persistence with highly invasive methods; and it is robust enough to contain various payloads/functionalites.

Evolution of Blackbeard

Confronting this threat for the first time, we wondered about its classification. Using AVAST’s Malware Similarity Search, we found an old sample (the TimeStamp said “02 / 20 / 12 @ 3:30:55am UTC”) in the malware database that shared the threat’s structure of PE header. Moreover, it also contained debug info with a string “Blackbeard,” so we decided to dub it like that.

The development of the code evolved in time. We can connect a part of the infection chain of this Trojan with the threat called Win32/64:Viknok. For both the historic and the current variant of Blackbeard, the complexity of the structure is sketched on this scheme: